Coffee shop a trendy spot to roost

Shawn Andrews is co-owner of The Rooster, a vintage-style coffee shop at Riverdale and Broadview.

By:Jessica HumeSpecial to the Star, Published on Tue May 08 2012

If a small business is like a baby, Shawn Andrews’ has only just begun to sleep through the night.

Her baby is just 14 months old, but it’s already quite precocious. Its name is The Rooster, and this little coffee shop at the corner of Riverdale and Broadview has had a profound impact on the east-end neighbourhood.

At any given time of day, the vintage-themed but unpretentious shop is filled with a cross-section of Riverdale residents, most of whom are on a first-name basis with the eight staff members, whose skillful latte art and genuine warmth never fail to impress.

But owning a coffee shop was never the plan. It was a dream.

Andrews and her boyfriend, Dave Watson, with whom she owns The Rooster, both worked in the film industry — Watson still does. When they bought the house next door several years ago, the shop was a convenience store, run-down and trashy. But Andrews had a vision.

“People who work in the film industry know they have to have a Plan B,” she explains. “When we bought the house, we realized that there was a real small-town feel in the east end. We got to know people from hanging out on the porch, from the dog park. But the area didn’t have that connecting place, like a clubhouse. I was daydreaming, looking at the store and thinking how cool it would be to turn it into a coffee shop.”

Andrews approached the owner and shared her intentions: If he ever wanted to sell the place, could he please let her know before putting it on the market. Only a few months later, he did. Within a month, Andrews and Watson went from being coffee-shop patrons to coffee-shop owners.

Andrews had owned small businesses in the past — she sold holistic dog treats for awhile, for example — but none ever involved real estate. Once they had purchased the space, a steep learning curve followed.

“I really didn’t anticipate the amount of daily work involved in this,” she says, sitting in front of a calculator and various stacks of papers. According to her initial business plan, Andrews and Watson would do everything. They’d open, close, do all the inventory, place all the orders, do the books.

“On day three, we realized we couldn’t do it all on our own.”

A friend in business helped with their new business plan; the CFO who lives on the corner helped sort out the finances; friends at another coffee shop helped with finding a roaster and other suppliers.

“The community support was unbelievable,” Andrews says.

One helper was Norm Lehman, a small-business coach who has years of experience in advertising and marketing.

He says one of the greatest challenges to small-business owners is the fact that the burden of productivity on each individual is substantially higher than in larger businesses.

“The thing is, you have to see the business as an entity in itself,” he says.

“It has needs, it has responsibilities and it has duties. The owners need to tend to those things. So what I try and do for small-business owners is to bring the discipline and strategy that empowers big businesses.”

For Andrews, that meant developing the staff, suppliers and systems necessary for the shop to essentially run itself.

“Every time you scramble, you learn,” Lehman says.

Waste, for example, was something Andrews didn’t think about initially.

“I have to pay such close attention when I place the food orders every morning, because $20 of waste in food a day can really add up,” she now realizes. “Waste can kill a small business. I never knew that.”

Although her baby is now sleeping through the night, Andrews describes many hours spent in the dog park crying; questioning whether the decision to open a coffee shop was the right one.

“Some of the worst advice I got at the beginning was from a business guy,” she recalls. “He said to count the number of people who walked by the location on a counter, and that would tell me whether there was enough traffic here to sustain a business. So I did that, and when I saw the numbers, yeah, I was balling my eyes out in the park.”

The numbers didn’t bode well because, prior to The Rooster’s launch, that stretch of Broadview was not a destination. Now, it is.

On a frigid weekday morning, Fabrizio Filippo is sitting at the long hardwood table (built by Watson) at the back of the shop, hunched over a laptop. He’s a regular, here almost every day, doing his job of writing for TV and movies.

He’s lived in the neighbourhood for 10 years and, although The Rooster is a recent addition, he can’t imagine his life without it.

“I first started coming here for the espresso; it’s good and the other coffee shops in the area didn’t sell it,” he explains. “I know people in the neighbourhood I didn’t know before. I’ve made business connections here. Honestly, I’d never been a regular at a coffee shop before.”

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